So, Supermassive released this VR rail-shooter for the PSVR2 after the first season of the Dark Pictures Anthology series ended. It might, at first, seem kind of weird for Supermassive to try to switch from choice & dialogue based narrative games to this kind of VR experience, but they’ve done it before. After Until Dawn released, they put out a rail shooter for VR called Until Dawn: Rush of Blood and also a very short VR prequel to Until Dawn called The Inpatient. Those were both for the original PSVR, but here, Supermassive takes the leap into the new generation of VR.
The basic gist here is that you go on a series of roller-coaster-esque rides through levels that are obviously inspired by the first four games in the anthology series. So, in Little Hope, for instance, your ride takes you through the wintery, foggy and dark landscape of the titular town as you shoot objects for points and also enemies based on the enemies from that game. The House of Ashes level takes you into desert caves and has you fighting the demonic aliens from that game. And so on. The two Little Hope levels were by far my favorite; they captured the atmosphere of all of the games fairly well which means that my preferences were pretty well reflected by how I ranked the games themselves: Little Hope my favorite, Man of Medan my least favorite, etc.
There is a slight attempt at a story here. The game starts with your character being in a train crash and then, as you progress through the levels you’re stalked by this mysterious, menacing woman who you saw on the train just before it crashed. If you’ve guessed what the “twist” is, you get no prizes; it’s pretty obvious. You also have the opportunity to solve puzzles or pull off some more sophisticated shooting tricks in order to save other victims of the train crash along the way, either freeing them to escape the level or leaving them to be claimed by the mysterious woman.
Bottom line, this isn’t really my kind of game and so I can’t really speak to how this fits into the realm of the rail shooter. Is this a particularly excellent execution of the genre? I doubt it. But it is fun, atmospheric and it has the cheap thrills you come to a horror-based rail shooter for: some stomach-dropping car maneuvers and some incredibly loud jump scares.
Since this is the first time I’ve reviewed a PSVR2 game, I suppose I should say a word or two about the system. I’ll have more to say when I review a different game, but for now I’ll just say that it corrects a lot of the problems with the PSVR and it is, overall, very immersive; I’m a guy who just doesn’t get immersed in VR games as much as some people seem to, but I think the PSVR 2 is as immersive a headset as I’ve ever used. One negative is that I also found that this gave me substantially more eyestrain than any other VR headset I’ve used. I typically couldn’t play this longer than about twenty minutes before I would start feeling the strain. Anyway, this game was definitely way more fun in VR than it would have been as a regular rail shooter. Still, is it a must play? No. If you’re a Dark Pictures fan? Well . . . still no, I think, but you’ll appreciate more than most others if you do.